"I apologize if where was a misunderstanding," Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez Bonilla told the Guatemalan radio station Emisores Unidos. "It was a mix-up. We were referring to information generated from the area that there was possibly a crime scene with a dead person resembling El Chapo."

Bonilla said the original account was based on news reports quoting testimony from residents of the jungle region of Peten, an isolated area on the Guatemala-Mexico border where the alleged confrontation took place.

An Associated Press photographer in the area also found no signs of a shootout or victims, just a checkpoint of 12 soldiers stopping vehicles in an area considered to be held by Mexico's Zetas cartel, Sinaloa's biggest rival.

Al Jazeera 's John Hendren, reporting from Mexico City, called the incident "one of the more spectacular examples of initial information apparently being wrong."